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Paint the mutha Pink!

A recent comic from American Mythology has a cover of the Pink Panther TV cast on it, by yours truly. The original idea was for it to be a center spread, but it had to be altered after completion to fit the cover (mostly). When it’s displayed on the shelf, you see this…

Which is fine, but Crazylegs is cut off mid beak, because we had to shift everything around to get Pink on the displayed part of the cover. When you consider it was originally drawn in one complete illustration, and not a bunch of pre-produced vector graphics from a corporate library, you can imagine what a pain it was to get this. In the original drawing (that was intended to be a center spread of a comic) you see how Pink would have been the focal point of the full image. We had to downshift his status to the same as the rest just to get him centered on the folded cover, but we had to flip him to keep “Blue Racer” from being covered up by the Inspector. I think the whole thing works better in the original…

There were other changes demanded by MGM, like altering the Texas/Tijuana Toads sizes, which was based on a cartoon they appeared in with Crazylegs Crane. They also made us down play Roland’s role as a fighter pilot, despite that also being based on a specific cartoon. Worst was having to change Rattfink’s color from green to caucasian flesh tones, with them saying emphatically “he’s not green”. Funny, he’s green in about 90% of the cartoons MGM produced, and especially “green” on the box set the company released within the past year.

It often amazes me how people who work for a company that owns a product, don’t bother to learn the history of it.